Working on a deep dive of the FinTech/Digital Banking space in Southeast Asia.

I don’t think people quite realise the scale of the opportunity here. Due to the nature of many jobs in the region, there are a vast number of adults who remain unbanked/underbanked. (60-70%) In many cases, they lack basic access to savings products, insurance, investments and credit.

There is a huge opportunity for a variety of different players to address this low hanging fruit. It is coincidence that $GRAB & $SE prioritised the proliferation of their financial services business years ago, before they dominated their respective core businesses.

While platform businesses like ride-hailing and e-commerce do have a competitive advantage with regard to data, low/zero CAC, there have been several country-specific first movers.

For instance, the Philippines leads the region on digital financial inclusion metrics due to the competitive nature of GCash and Maya, with the former backed by the likes of Ant Group and Globe Telecom while the latter is backed by Tencent, KKR, PLDT etc.

Vietnam has a dominant player in MoMo that boasts over 40M registered users in a country of 98M people.

Indonesia has perhaps the most competitive landscape with 5 major layers: OVO (Grab), GoPay (GoTo), ShopeePay, Dana, LinkAja.

Yet, there are realistically only 2 regional players: $SE $GRAB. In the piece, I will discuss each player in depth, the scale of the opportunity and what I believe investors should look out for.

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